Home & Garden

On a cool spring morning when the forsythia has just begun to bloom and rhododendron buds swell with impatience, men and women in red sweatshirts gather at a garden in Eisenhower Park. The arbor is bare, but daffodils dance around a mailbox at the entrance and the long, rectangular beds where the bloom called the Queen of Flowers lives are cleared of winter's debris. The gardeners are pilgrims paying homage to spring. It's time to prune the roses.

With Mother Nature's cooperation, it's time for the merry month of May to stage a color spectacular. Remember what they say about April showers and look for a bevy of blooms, from shy columbines to bold peonies. Expect bleeding hearts to weep with beauty and lilacs to perfume the borders. It's a month for dogwoods and Japanese cherry trees, for azaleas and forget-me-nots - as if we could forget their blueness, at left. And keep the color coming - make sure you get all those seedlings into the ground and in containers, too, as we reach the safe planting date in the middle of the month.

When it comes to gardening, tips are as plentiful as weeds.

I'm afloat in the first wave of annual colors that wash away winter's memory. I'm not talking about flowering trees or dancing daffodils or any of the bulbs I planted months ago. Or, for that matter, heat-lovers like impatiens and petunias and geraniums. They shouldn't go outside until the middle of May - at the earliest.

The first time I talked to Bill Radler, I was in rose hell. At least it was hell for the roses - long rows of more than 500 varieties frying in an August sun, many of the shrubs covered with Japanese beetles and stained by black spot.

I think of April as a joyous month, when spring is a living painting stretched across my world. A few daffodils couldn't wait and bloomed during a warm week in January, but most of them had more patience, and they're entering their time of glory. I exchange smiles with my pansies and bask in the sunshine of the forsythia. Trees buds open and tulips go on parade. I nurture beds and borders and know more than ever that the garden is a metaphor for hope and rebirth.

For a long time, I had this dream of sitting by a lagoon in a tropical paradise overflowing with orchids - all kinds and colors. They're hanging from trees, nestled into ferns, cascading over mossy banks, winding along jungle paths, dangling from rocky promontories.

In just two days, at precisely 8:07 p.m., the vernal equinox will occur in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun will cross directly over the equator - making night and day momentarily equal and spring both official and irrevocable. Whether the heavens greet the occasion with clear skies or stormy winds and snow won't change a thing.

It's fairly common knowledge that a rose is a rose is a rose, that daffodils show up in golden clouds and tulips are for tiptoes, that lilacs grow in doorways and April showers bring May flowers. But you may not know that according to a Chinese proverb, "losing face is as important to people as losing bark is to a tree," or - and you'll have to take this from an anonymous source - "weeds are people's idea, not nature's."

I don't know about you, but I love a good flower show. It's like looking at the display cases of a great bakery and wishing you could take everything home - or bake all those wonderful cakes and luscious pastries yourself. Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately for my waistline - I'm not much of a baker. At least with flowers, I have a fighting chance.

And here we are in the month of rebirth and bluster, when winds sound off and spring returns and gardeners come back to earth. The shivers of February fade in memory when the soil crumbles in our hands - assuring us that it's time for spades and trowels and seeds. Tradition holds that peas should be planted on St. Patrick's Day, although caution dictates that the temperature should be at least 40 degrees. Earthworms are wriggling to the surface, and I listen for the song of the spring peepers by my koi pond. My spirits bloom along with the pansies and primroses.

It was November and for the most part my garden had gone to sleep. We planted bulbs and dreamed of spring. And then buds opened on a shrub in a polyglot patch along the backyard fence and lovely white flowers offset the gathering cold. I spotted them from my kitchen window and smiled. It had taken a couple of years, but my lone camellia bush had finally come into its own.

The species survived 17 ice ages and the splitting of subcontinents. Dinosaurs trod the Earth in its shade, and for 2 million years, only fossils testified to its existence. So it is exciting to know that it raises its evergreen arms along a ledge in the Australian bush.